Digital Tools Evolve the Way We Help Others
Digital communication has changed the way organizations help people. Whether it’s an earthquake in Ecuador, a cyclone in Mozambique or contact tracing of a COVID-19 super spreader, lightning-speed communications have enabled the deployment of needed help and intervention as quickly as possible.
Gone are the days when nongovernmental organizations had to engage in leafleting, expensive TV spots, once-in-a-blue-moon magazine features and interviews, campaigning via big events, or securing hard-to-get newspaper space for press releases. Digital humanitarianism has put the social cause ecosystem on steroids, so to speak, and has given this ability to make a profound impact even to individuals who don’t have the manpower and system support of an NGO.
‘Give What You Can’
One such example is the Maginhawa Community Pantry in the Philippines, which started with 26-year-old Ana Patricia Non. Forced to close her small business due to the lockdowns in Metro Manila, Patricia’s goal was to survive and stay healthy with her family. Even though she herself could hardly make ends meet, she couldn’t dismiss the thought of countless others who had it worse than her. So she did what she could. She parked a bamboo cart in a prominent corner of a busy street and stocked it with canned goods, a few vegetables, and some bags of rice. Above it, she taped a handwritten sign in Tagalog that said: “Give what you can, take only what you need.” Before long, a line of poor people waited for their turn to get their meal for the day and would also put in what little surplus they had.
Her post went viral overnight and her act of kindness would become a movement of personal initiatives replicated in thousands of sites across the country and has now even gone global. This phenomenon exhibits the “almighty power of social media as a means of collective action” (Shirky, 2011) and contrasts with “a feel-good activism that has zero political and social impact” (Morozov, 2011). And while Pradip Thomas writes that participation may have been “stripped of its radical edge” and become “the means to reinforce the status quo,” the Community Pantry has proven otherwise.
The Upside of Digital Communication
The benefits of digital communication that enabled one person to multiply her relief efforts are magnified for an NGO which has greater resources at its disposal. Some obvious advantages include greater awareness of its causes and work, a wider net of potential donors and volunteers, immediate sourcing of needs, and nimbler systems and databases to process target clients.
These advantages have no doubt benefited World Vision International, a global Christian relief and development organization dedicated to the welfare of children. Since its foundation in the 1950s, their beneficiaries have grown from an initial 300 orphans to 39.2 million children worldwide.
Decades ago, I remember attending a big conference where they solicited donations by asking you to choose a child you want to support from a stack of children’s photos that had information on each one. But since 2019, they’ve been doing it the other way around: willing sponsors have their photos taken and the children get to pick their donor in a program fittingly called Chosen — a classic application of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s bottom-up pedagogy (Thomas, 2019).
In a World Vision article, Rev. Mat Grover recounts what he witnessed in one Chosen event: “Tears filled their eyes and their expressions changed from ‘pick me’ to genuine smiles…. These kids… suddenly found themselves at a place where their voices mattered; they had a choice.”
And often, the power to make a choice is all a person needs to take a small step cum giant leap that initiates social change.
References
Thomas, P. (2019). Communication for social change: context, social movements and the digital. SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd.
Villavecer, N. (2021, April 27). Ana Patricia Non and a street that turned into a movement. Rappler. https://www.rappler.com/moveph/maginhawa-community-pantry-ana-patricia-street-becomes-movement.
World Vision Development Foundation. (2020). World Vision 2020 Annual Report. https://www.worldvision.org.ph/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WVDF-Annual-Report-2020.pdf.
Staff, W. V. (2019, September 23). Children now have the power to choose their sponsor: World Vision. B2B. https://www.worldvision.org/corporate/2019/09/20/children-now-have-the-power-to-choose-their-sponsor/.